CONTENTS

Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Preface
Notes
From Narration to Information
Notes
The Poverty of Experience
Notes
The Narrated Life
Notes
Bare Life
Notes
The Disenchantment of the World
Notes
From Shocks to Likes
Notes
Theory as Narrative
Notes
Narration as Healing
Notes
Narrative Community
Notes
Storyselling
Notes
End User License Agreement
The Crisis of Narration
Byung-Chul Han

Translated by Daniel Steuer

polity
Originally published in German as Die Krise der Narration © MSB
Matthes & Seitz Berlin Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, Berlin 2023. All rights
reserved.
This English edition © Polity Press, 2024
Excerpt from Peter Handke, Zwiegespräch © Suhrkamp Verlag AG,
Berlin, 2022. Included with permission of the publisher.
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6044-8
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023939907
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Watch out, narration.
A little bit of patience for narration, please.
And then: patience through narration!
Peter Handke*
* Zwiegespräch, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2022, p. 10
PREFACE
Everyone is talking about ‘narratives’. Paradoxically, the in lation of
narrative betrays a crisis of narration. At the heart of all the noise of
storytelling, there is a narrative vacuum that expresses itself in a lack
of meaning and orientation.1 Neither storytelling nor the narrative turn
will be able to bring about the return of narration. A paradigm becomes
a topic, and a fashionable object of academic research, only when there
is a deep-seated alienation from it. All the talk about narratives suggests
their dysfunctionality.
As long as narratives were our anchor in being, that is, as long as they
provided us with a site, turning being-in-the-world into being-at-home
by furnishing life with meaning, support and orientation – in other
words, as long as living was a narrating – there was never any talk of
storytelling or narration. The in lation in the use of such concepts
begins precisely when narratives lose their original power, their
gravitational force, their secret and magic. Once they are seen as
something constructed, they lose their moment of inner truth. They are
considered contingent, exchangeable and modi iable. They are no
longer the source of what is binding, of what unites. They no longer
anchor us in being. Despite the present hype around narratives, we live
in a post-narrative time. Narrative consciousness, allegedly rooted in
the human brain, is a conception that is possible only in a post-
narrative time, that is, outside of the narrative spell.
Religion is a typical narrative with an inner moment of truth. It
narrates contingency away. Christian religion is a meta-narrative that
reaches into every nook and cranny of life and anchors it in being. Time
itself becomes freighted with narrative. In the Christian calendar, each
day is meaningful. In the post-narrative era, the calendar is de-
narrativized; it becomes a meaningless schedule of appointments.
Religious holidays are highlights and high points of a narrative.
Without a narrative, there are no festivities, no festive times – no
festive moods with their intensi ied feeling of being. All that is left are
work and free time, production and consumption. In the post-narrative
era, festivities are commercialized. They become events and
spectacles. Rituals are also narrative practices: they are always
embedded in a narrative context. As symbolic techniques for creating
enclosure, they transform being-in-the-world into a being-at-home.
A world-changing and world-opening narrative cannot be created by
the whim of a single person. Rather, it owes its existence to a complex
process in which various forces and actors are involved. Ultimately, a
narrative is an expression of the mood of a time. Such narratives, which
have an inner moment of truth, are the opposite of the eviscerated,
exchangeable and contingent narratives – that is, the micro-narratives
– of the present, which lack gravity, which lack any moment of truth.
Narration is a concluding form. It creates a closed order that founds
meaning and identity. In late modernity, which is characterized by
opening up and unbounding, forms of concluding and closing off are
increasingly eroded. At the same time, with increasing permissiveness
comes a growing need for narrative forms of closure. Populist,
nationalist and right-wing extremist or tribal narratives, including
conspiracy theories, cater to this need. They are taken up because they
offer meaning and identity. However, in the post-narrative era, with its
intensifying experience of contingency, these narratives do not have
any strong binding force.
Narratives create a community. Storytelling, by contrast, brings forth
only a leeting community – the commodi ied form of community.
These communities consist of consumers. No amount of storytelling
could recreate the ire around which humans gather to tell each other
stories. That ire has long since burnt out. It has been replaced by the
digital screen, which separates people as individual consumers.
Consumers are lonely. They do not form a community. Nor can the
‘stories’ shared on social media ill the narrative vacuum. They are
merely forms of pornographic self-presentation or self-promotion.
Posting, liking and sharing content are consumerist practices that
intensify the narrative crisis.
Through storytelling, capitalism appropriates the narrative and
submits it to consumption. Storytelling produces narratives in a
consumable form. It charges products with emotion. It promises
unique experiences. We buy, sell and consume narratives and
emotions. Stories sell. Storytelling is storyselling.
Narration and information are counteracting forces. Information
intensi ies the experience of contingency, whereas narration reduces it
by turning the accidental into necessity. Information lacks the solidity of
being. Niklas Luhmann puts it lucidly: ‘[Information’s] cosmology is not
a cosmology of being but of contingency.’2 Being and information are
mutually exclusive. A lack of being, a forgetfulness of being, is thus
immanent to the information society. Information is additive and
cumulative. It is not a bearer of sense, whereas a narration carries
sense. The original meaning of ‘sense’ is direction. Today, we are
perfectly informed, but we lack orientation. Information also dissects
time into a mere sequence of present moments. A narrative, by
contrast, brings forth a temporal continuum, that is, a story.
On the one hand, the informatization of society accelerates its de-
narrativization. On the other, amid the tsunami of information, there
arises a need for meaning, identity and orientation, that is, a need to
clear the thick forest of information in which we risk losing ourselves. The
lood of ephemeral narratives, including conspiracy theories, and the
tsunami of information are ultimately two sides of the same coin.
Adrift in the sea of information and data, we seek a narrative anchor.
We tell fewer and fewer stories in our everyday lives. Telling stories is
in decline because communication takes the form of the exchange of
information. Scarcely any stories are told on social media. Stories unite
people by promoting their capacity for empathy. They create genuine
community. The loss of empathy in the age of the smartphone is a clear
sign that this technology is not a medium for telling stories. Its
technical dispositif is already a barrier to the telling of stories. Typing
and swiping are not narrative gestures. A smartphone allows only for
the accelerated exchange of information. Narrating presupposes close
listening and deep attention. The narrative community is a community
of attentive listeners. But we increasingly lack the patience for
attentive listening, even the patience for narrative.
When everything becomes contingent, leeting and accidental, and all
that is binding and unifying dissolves – that is, in the current storm of
contingency – there is a clamour for storytelling. The in lation of
narrative betrays a need to be able to cope with contingency. But
storytelling is unable to transform the information society, which is
devoid of orientation and meaning, back into a stable narrative
community. Rather, storytelling is a pathological phenomenon of our
era. The narrative crisis has a long prehistory. This essay attempts to
trace it.
Notes
1. Transl. note: Here and throughout, ‘storytelling’ is in English in
the original, except in passages on Walter Benjamin, where the
German is ‘Erzä hler’/’Erzä hlen’. The term is used for
commodi ied forms of narration, as opposed to the proper
telling of stories, ‘Geschichten erzä hlen’. The term ‘storytelling’
should therefore not be associated with Walter Benjamin’s well-
known essay ‘The Storyteller’, ‘Der Erzä hler’, which spells out
the characteristics of the proper telling of stories.
2. Niklas Luhmann, ‘Entscheidungen in der
Informationsgesellschaft’, at
https://www.fen.ch/texte/gast_luhmann_informationsgesellsc
haft.htm
From Narration to Information
The founder of the French daily newspaper Le Figaro, Hippolyte de
Villemessant, expressed the essence of information in the following
remark: ‘To my readers, an attic ire in the Latin Quarter is more
important than a revolution in Madrid.’ For Walter Benjamin, the
remark ‘makes strikingly clear that what gets the readiest hearing is no
longer intelligence coming from afar, but the information which
supplies a handle for what is nearest’. The newspaper reader’s
attention extends only to what is near. It shrinks to mere curiosity. The
modern newspaper reader jumps from one news item to the next,
instead of letting her gaze drift into the distance and linger. The
modern reader has lost the long, slow, lingering gaze.
A piece of news that is embedded in a story has an altogether different
spatial and temporal structure from that of information. It comes ‘from
afar’.1 This distance is its characteristic trait. Modernity is
characterized by the progressive demolition of farness, the place of
which is taken by gaplessness. Information is a genuine expression of a
gaplessness that makes everything available. A piece of news that
arrives is marked by an unavailable distance. It announces a historical
event that resists availability and computability. We are at its mercy, as
if faced with the power of destiny.
Information does not survive the moment it is registered: ‘It lives only
at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself
to it without losing any time.’2 Unlike information, a piece of news
possesses a temporal breadth through which it is related to what is to
come beyond the present moment. It is pregnant with history. A broad
narrative oscillation inheres in it.
Information is the medium of reporters who sift the world for news.
The storyteller [Erzä hler] is the reporter’s counter- igure. A storyteller
does not inform or explain. In fact, the art of storytelling demands that
information be withheld: ‘Actually, it is half the art of storytelling
[Erzä hlen] to keep a story free from explanation as one recounts it.’3
Withheld information – that is, a lack of explanation – heightens
narrative tension.
Gaplessness destroys nearness as well as distance. Nearness is not the
same as gaplessness, because distance is inscribed in nearness.
Nearness and distance cause and animate each other. It is this interplay
between nearness and distance that creates the aura: ‘The trace is
appearance of a nearness, however far removed the thing that left it
behind may be. The aura is appearance of a distance, however close the
thing that calls it forth.’4 The aura is narrative because it is impregnated
by distance. By removing distance, information, by contrast, de-
auratizes and disenchants the world. It ixates the world and thus
makes it available. The ‘trace’ that points to the distance is full of
allusions; it tempts us to narrate.
The cause of the narrative crisis in modernity is the deluge of
information. The spirit of narration is suffocated by the lood.
Benjamin states: ‘If the art of storytelling has become rare, the
dissemination of information has played a decisive role in this state of
affairs.’5 Information pushes to the margins those events that cannot
be explained but only narrated. A narrative often has something
wondrous and mysterious around its edges. It is incompatible with
information, which represents the opposite of the secret. Explanation
and narration are mutually exclusive:
Every morning brings us news from across the globe, yet we are
poor in noteworthy stories. This is because nowadays no event
comes to us without already being shot through with
explanations. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens
bene its storytelling; almost everything bene its information.6
For Benjamin, Herodotus is the ancient master of narration. His story
of Psammenitus serves as the prime example of his art of narration.
When the Egyptian king was captured following his defeat at the hands
of the Persian king Cambyses, Cambyses humbled his prisoner by
forcing him to watch the triumphal procession of the Persians. He
arranged it that the prisoner should see his captured daughter pass by
as a maid. While all the Egyptians standing along the way were
lamenting this fact, Psammenitus stood silent and motionless, his eyes
 ixed on the ground. When he saw his son, who was being led to his
execution as part of the procession, he was still motionless. But when
he recognized his servant, an old and frail man, among the prisoners,
he hit his head with his ists and expressed his deep mourning. For
Benjamin, this story reveals what true storytelling is. He believes that
any attempt to explain why the Egyptian king began to lament only
when he saw his servant would destroy the narrative tension. Forgoing
explanation is essential to true storytelling. Narrative does without
explanation:
Herodotus offers no explanations. His report is utterly dry. That is
why, after thousands of years, this story from ancient Egypt is still
capable of provoking astonishment and re lection. It is like those
seeds of grain that have lain for centuries in the airtight chambers
of the pyramids and have retained their germinative power to this
day.7
According to Benjamin, a story ‘does not expend itself. It preserves and
concentrates its energy and is capable of releasing it even after a long
time.’8 The temporality of information is altogether different. It is
relevant only brie ly, so it is quickly exhausted. It is effective only for a
moment. Bits of information are like specks of dust, not seeds of grain.
They lack germinal force. Once they are registered, they immediately
sink into oblivion, like answerphone messages once they have been
listened to.
For Benjamin, the earliest sign of the decline of narration is the rise of
the novel at the beginning of modernity. A narrative feeds off
experience and passes it down from one generation to the next. ‘The
storyteller takes what he tells from experience – his own or that
reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those
who are listening to his tale.’ A novel, by contrast, is an expression of
the ‘profound perplexity of the living’.9 A narrative creates community;
a novel, however, is born of the lonely, isolated individual. A novel
psychologizes and interprets, but a narrative proceeds descriptively:
‘The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the
greatest accuracy, but the psychological connections among the events
are not forced on the reader.’ However, the ultimate decline of narration
comes not with the novel but with the rise of information under
capitalism:
On the other hand, we can see that with the complete ascendancy
of the bourgeoisie – which in fully developed capitalism has the
press as one of its most important instruments – a form of
communication emerges which, no matter how ancient its origins,
never before decisively in luenced the epic form. But now it does
exert such an in luence. And ultimately it confronts storytelling as
no less of a stranger than did the novel … This new form of
communication is information.10
Storytelling requires a state of relaxation. For Benjamin, the ‘apogee of
mental relaxation’ is boredom. It is the ‘dream bird that hatches the egg
of experience’.11 It is ‘a warm gray fabric lined on the inside with the
most lustrous and colorful of silks. In this fabric we wrap ourselves
when we dream.’12 Noisy information – the ‘rustling in the leaves’ –
drives the dream bird away. Amid the murmur of the press, there can
be ‘no more weaving and spinning’, only the production and
consumption of information as stimuli.13
Narrating and listening foster each other. The narrative community is a
community of careful listeners. A particular kind of attention is inherent
to careful listening. People who listen carefully are oblivious to
themselves; they immerse themselves in what they hear: ‘The more
self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply what he listens to is
impressed upon his memory.’14 We are increasingly losing the gift to
listen carefully. We play to the gallery; we eavesdrop on each other
instead of forgetting ourselves and listening intensely.
On the internet, this space of rustling digital leaves, the dream bird
cannot build a nest. The information seekers drive him away. In today’s
state of hyperactivity, where boredom is not allowed to emerge, we
never reach the state of deep mental relaxation. The information
society is an age of heightened mental tension, because the essence of
information is surprise and the stimulus it provides. The tsunami of
information means that our perceptual apparatus is permanently
stimulated. It can no longer enter into contemplation. The tsunami of
information fragments our attention. It prevents the contemplative
lingering that is essential to narrating and careful listening.
Digitalization sets in train a process that Benjamin could not have
foreseen. He associates information with the press, and for him the
press is a form of communication alongside the narrative and the
novel. In the process of digitalization, however, information acquires
an altogether different status. Reality itself takes on the form of
information and data. For the most part, we perceive reality in terms of
information or through the lens of information. Information is an idea
– that is, a re-presentation. When reality takes the form of information,
the immediate experience of presence withers. When digitalization
gives everything the form of information, reality is lattened.
A century after Benjamin, information is becoming a new form of being,
even a new form of domination. Alongside neoliberalism, we are seeing
the establishment of an information regime that works not through
repression but through seduction. It takes on a smart form. It does not
operate through imperatives or prohibitions. It does not silence us.
Rather, this smart form of domination constantly asks us to
communicate our opinions, needs and preferences, to tell our lives, to
post, share and like messages. Freedom is not repressed but
comprehensively exploited. It turns into control and manipulation.
Because it does not need to appear, smart domination is highly
ef icient. It hides behind the illusion of freedom and communication.
By posting, sharing and liking, we subordinate ourselves to the context
of domination.
The rush of information and communication is stupefying. We are no
longer masters of our communication; rather, we are subject to an
accelerated exchange of information that escapes our conscious
control. Communication is increasingly controlled by external forces. It
seems to be guided by an automatic, mechanical process that is
directed by algorithms, a process of which we are, however, unaware.
We are at the mercy of the algorithmic black box. Human beings are
reduced to data sets that can be controlled and exploited.
In the information regime, Georg Bü chner’s remark is still relevant: ‘We
are puppets, our strings are pulled by unknown forces, we ourselves
are nothing, nothing!’15 The only difference is that the forces guiding us
today are so subtle and hidden that we are no longer aware of them. We
even confuse them with freedom. Charlie Kaufman’s puppet animation
Anomalisa illustrates the logic of smart domination. It depicts a world
in which all humans look alike and speak with the same voice. This
world reveals the neoliberal hell of the same, in which, paradoxically,
there are constant invocations of authenticity and creativity. The ilm’s
protagonist, Michael Stone, is a successful motivational coach. One day,
he suddenly realizes that he is a puppet. The mouth falls off his face,
and he holds it in his hands. He is stunned: the mouth continues to
chatter all by itself.
Notes
1. All quotations from Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller:
Observations on the Works of Nikolai Leskov’, in Selected
Writings, Vol. 3, 1935–1938, Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 2002, pp. 143–66; here: p. 147.
2. Ibid., p. 148.
3. Ibid.
4. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Cambridge MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999, p. 447.
5. Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, p. 147.
6. Ibid., pp. 147f.
7. Ibid., p. 148. Benjamin does not quote from Psammenitus’s story
verbatim. The original differs signi icantly from his summary. It
seems that he follows the version presented by Michel de
Montaigne in the Essais.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., p. 146.
10. Ibid., p. 147 (transl. modi ied).
11. Ibid., p. 149.
12. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 105.
13. Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, p. 149. Transl. note: ‘Rustling in the
leaves’ translates ‘Rauschen im Blä tterwald’. ‘Blä tterwald’ is a
colloquial and mildly dismissive term for the growing number
of press titles whose quantity is not necessarily matched by
their quality.
14. Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, p. 149.
15. Georg Bü chner, Danton’s Death, Act 2, Scene 5, in The Major
Works, New York: W. W. Norton, 2012, p. 52.
The Poverty of Experience
Walter Benjamin begins his essay ‘Experience and Poverty’ with the
fable of the old man who, on his deathbed, tells his sons that there is a
treasure buried in his vineyard. The sons dig every day, across the
whole vineyard, but ind no treasure. When autumn comes, they realize
that their father had passed on a piece of experience: ‘the blessing lies
in hard work and not in gold’. For the vineyard provided a richer
harvest than any other in the country. Experience is characterized by
the fact that it is passed down from one generation to the next through
narration. Benjamin laments the loss of experience in modernity:
Where has it all gone? Who still meets people who really know how
to tell a story? Where do you still hear words from the dying that
last, and that pass from one generation to the next like a precious
ring? Who can still call on a proverb when he needs one?1
Communicable experience passed on by word of mouth is becoming
increasingly rare. Nothing is passed down; nothing is narrated.
Benjamin holds that the storyteller ‘is a man who has counsel for his
listeners’.2 Such counsel does not simply provide solutions to
problems. Rather, it suggests how a story is to be continued. The one
seeking counsel and the counsellor both belong to a narrative
community. Those seeking counsel must themselves be able to narrate.
In real life, counsel is sought and given in a narrative context. As
wisdom, it is ‘woven into the fabric of real life’.3 Wisdom is embedded
in life as narrative. If life can no longer be narrated, wisdom
deteriorates, and its place is taken by problem-solving techniques.
Wisdom is narrated truth: ‘The art of storytelling is nearing its end
because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out.’4
Experience requires tradition and continuity. Experience stabilizes life
and makes the narration of life possible. When experience
disintegrates, when there is no longer anything binding or stable, all
that is left is bare life, a kind of survival. Benjamin expresses his
scepticism towards modernity and its poverty of experience in
unequivocal terms. For him, it
is obvious: experience has fallen in value … A generation that had
gone to school on horsedrawn streetcars now stood under the
open sky in a landscape where nothing remained unchanged but
the clouds and, beneath those clouds, in a force ield of destructive
torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body.5
Despite his doubts, Benjamin frequently reveals some – limited –
optimism regarding modernity. His tone often switches from the
elegiac to the euphoric. He also believes that he can see a ‘new beauty’
in the vanishing of experience. He grants that the poverty of experience
is a new form of barbarism, but claims that something positive can be
found in it: ‘Barbarism? Yes, indeed. We say this in order to introduce a
new, positive concept of barbarism. For what does poverty of
experience do for the barbarian?’6
Experience founds a historical continuum. The new barbarians
emancipate themselves from the context of tradition in which
experience is embedded. The poverty of experience forces the
barbarians ‘to start from scratch’. They are animated by the passion of
the new. They begin with a tabula rasa. They see themselves not as
storytellers but as ‘constructors’. Benjamin generalizes the new
barbarianism and turns it into the principle of the new: ‘Such a
constructor was Descartes, who required nothing more to launch his
entire philosophy than the single certitude, “I think, therefore I am.”
And he went on from there.’7
The new barbarians celebrate the poverty of experience as a moment
of emancipation:
Poverty of experience. This should not be understood to mean that
people are yearning for new experience. No, they long to free
themselves from experience; they long for a world in which they
can make such pure and decided use of their poverty – their outer
poverty, and ultimately also their inner poverty – that it will lead to
something respectable.8
Benjamin lists a number of modern artists and writers who af irm the
poverty of experience and harbour no illusions about it. They are
inspired by ‘starting from the very beginning’.9 They are determined to
bid farewell to the fusty world of the bourgeoisie and ‘turn instead to
the naked man of the contemporary world who lies screaming like a
newborn babe in the dirty diapers of the present’.10 They commit
themselves to transparency and reject anything secretive, that is,
anything auratic. They also reject anything to do with humanism.
Benjamin points out that they like to give their children ‘dehumanized’
names such as ‘Peka’, ‘Labu’ or ‘Aviakhim’ – the name of an airline. For
Benjamin, Paul Scheerbart’s glass house is emblematic of the future life
of human beings:
It is no coincidence that glass is such a hard, smooth material to
which nothing can be ixed. A cold and sober material into the
bargain. Objects made of glass have no ‘aura’. Glass is, in general,
the enemy of secrets.11
Benjamin also counts Mickey Mouse among the new barbarians:
Tiredness is followed by sleep, and then it is not uncommon for a
dream to make up for the sadness and discouragement of the day
– a dream that shows us in its realized form the simple but
magni icent existence for which the energy is lacking in reality.
The existence of Mickey Mouse is such a dream for contemporary
man.12
Benjamin admires the lightness that characterizes Mickey Mouse’s
existence. Mickey Mouse becomes a igure of salvation who re-
enchants the world:
And people who have grown weary of the endless complications of
everyday living and to whom the purpose of existence seems to
have been reduced to the most distant vanishing point on an
endless horizon, are redeemed by the sight of an existence … in
which a car is no heavier than a straw hat and the fruit on the tree
becomes round as quickly as a hot-air balloon.13
‘Experience and Poverty’ is shot through with ambivalence. Towards
the end, the exuberant apologia for modernity gives way again to a
sober assessment that is more in line with Benjamin’s deep-seated
scepticism towards modernity. Pre iguring the Second World War,
Benjamin writes:
We have become impoverished. We have given up one portion of
the human heritage after another, and have often left it at the
pawnbroker’s for a hundredth of its true value, in exchange for the
small change of ‘the contemporary.’ The economic crisis is at the
door, and behind it is the shadow of the approaching war.14
Modernity was at least a time that had visions. Glass, the real
protagonist of Paul Scheerbart’s visionary writings, was meant to be
the medium of the future that would lift human culture to the next
level. In his manifesto Glass Architecture, Scheerbart conjures the
beauty of a world in which glass is the universal building material.
Glass architecture would transform the earth as if it were ‘adorned
with sparkling jewels and enamel’.15 Then, ‘all over the world it would
be more splendid than in the gardens of the Arabian Nights’.16 In a
world of bright, colourful and seemingly hovering glass buildings,
people would be happier. Scheerbart’s visions concern beauty and
human happiness, and they afford glass, the medium of the future, a
particular aura. Real narratives about the future radiate an aura
because the future is a phenomenon of distance.
Modernity is animated by a belief in progress, an atmosphere of
departure, of clearing the tables and beginning anew, and by the spirit
of revolution. The Communist Manifesto is also a narrative about the
future; it resolutely turns away from the traditional order. The
manifesto talks about ‘the forcible overthrow of all existing social
conditions’.17 It is a grand narrative about the society to come.
Modernity, to use a phrase coined by Bertolt Brecht, possesses a
pronounced ‘sense of beginning’. Having cleared the table, it plays on
‘the great tabula rasa’.18
Unlike modernity, with its narratives of the future and progress – its
longing for another form of life – late modernity does not have a
revolutionary pathos of the new or of fresh beginnings. It lacks the
spirit of departure. It is therefore declining into a mode of ‘on and on’, of
absent alternatives. It loses narrative courage, the courage to create a
world-changing narrative. Storytelling is now mainly a matter of
commercialism and consumption. As storyselling, it does not contain
the power to bring about social change. This exhausted late modernity
does not know the ‘sense of beginning’, the passion of ‘beginning from
the start’. We no longer commit ourselves to anything. We constantly
take the trouble to do something. We succumb to convenience or to likes,
which need no narrative. Late modernity knows no longing, no vision,
no distance. It therefore lacks aura, that is, lacks a future.
Today’s tsunami of information sharpens the narrative crisis by
throwing us into a maelstrom of actuality. Information cuts up time.
Time is reduced to the narrow track of what is momentarily relevant. It
lacks temporal extension. The compulsion to actuality destabilizes our
life. The past no longer has any effect in the present. The future is
narrowed down; it becomes a stream of constant updates on what is
currently relevant. We thus exist without a history, for a narrative is a
history. We lose not only the capacity to have experiences, which are
condensed time, but also the capacity to construct narratives of the
future, which are based on a temporal dispersal. A life that trudges
along from one present moment to the next, from one crisis to the next,
from one problem to the next, slows to a mere survival. Living is more
than just problem solving. Someone who merely solves problems does
not have a future. It is only with narrative that a future opens up, for
narrative gives us hope.
Notes
1. Walter Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, in Selected Writings,
Vol. 2, Part 2 (1931–1934), Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999, pp. 731–6; here: p. 731.
2. Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, p. 145 (transl. modi ied).
3. Ibid., p. 146.
4. Ibid.
5. Benjamin, ‘Experience and Poverty’, pp. 731f.
6. Ibid., p. 732
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., p. 734.
9. Ibid., p. 733.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid., pp. 733f.
12. Ibid., pp. 734f.
13. Ibid., p. 735 (transl. modi ied).
14. Ibid.
15. Paul Scheerbart, Glass Architecture, in Paul Scheerbart,‘Glass
Architecture’ and Bruno Taut, ‘Alpine Architecture’, New York:
Praeger, 1972, pp. 41–74; here: p. 46.
16. Ibid. (transl. modi ied).
17. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto of the Communist
Party, in Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and The
 Communist Manifesto, New York: Prometheus Books, 1988, pp.
203–43; here: p. 243.
18. Bertolt Brecht, Plays, Poetry and Prose: Journals 1934–1955,
New York: Routledge, 1993, p. 166 (22 October 1941).
The Narrated Life
In The Arcades Project, Benjamin remarks:
Happiness for us is thinkable only in the air that we have breathed,
among the people who have lived with us. In other words, there
vibrates in the idea of happiness … the idea of salvation…. Our life,
it can be said, is a muscle strong enough to contract the whole of
historical time. Or, to put it differently, the genuine conception of
historical time rests entirely upon the image of redemption.1
Happiness is not a momentary event. It has a long tail that reaches back
into the past. Happiness feeds off all that has been part of a life. It does
not have a shiny appearance; its appearance is an afterglow. We owe
our happiness to the salvation of the past. This salvation requires a
narrative tension in which the present integrates the past, thereby
making the past a continuing in luence, even resurrecting the past. In
the state of happiness, salvation reverberates. When everything
becomes part of a maelstrom of actuality, a storm of contingency, there
can be no happiness for us.
Life, conceived as a muscle, would have to be enormously strong if men
are, as Marcel Proust imagines, temporal beings who ‘spend their lives
perched upon living stilts which never cease to grow until sometimes
they become taller than church steeples’.2 The end of In Search of Lost
Time is anything but triumphant:
And I was terri ied by the thought that the stilts beneath my own
feet might already have reached that height; it seemed to me that
quite soon now I might be too weak to maintain my hold upon a
past which already went down so far.3
For Proust, the task of the narrator is to salvage the past:
 So if I were given long enough to accomplish my work, I should not
fail, even if the effect were to make them resemble monsters, to
describe men as occupying so considerable a place, compared
with the restricted place which is reserved for them in space, a
place on the contrary prolonged past measure … in Time.4
In modernity, life atrophies. The decay of time is a threat to life. In his
In Search of Lost Time, Proust is ighting against temporal atrophy, the
disappearance of time as a kind of muscular atrophy. Time Regained
appeared in 1927, the same year that saw the publication of
Heidegger’s Being and Time. Heidegger was also determined to use his
writing to ight the temporal atrophy of modernity, the destabilization
and fragmentation of life. To the fragmentation and withering of life in
modernity he juxtaposes ‘the whole of existence stretched along’ in
‘which Dasein [Heidegger’s ontological term for human beings] as fate
“incorporates” into its existence birth and death and their “between”’.5
Human beings do not exist from one moment to the next. They are not
momentary beings. Their existence comprises the whole temporal
range that opens up between birth and death. In the absence of
external orientation and a narrative anchoring in being, the energy to
contract the time between birth and death into a living unity that
encapsulates all events and occurrences must come from the self. The
continuity of being is guaranteed by the continuity of the self. The
‘constancy of the self’ represents the central temporal axis that must
protect us against the fragmentation of time.6
Heidegger claims that Being and Time is an ahistorical analysis of
human existence, but it is in fact a re lection of the temporal crisis of
modernity. Anxiety, which plays such a prominent role in Being and
Time, is part of the pathology of modern man, who no longer has a irm
footing in the world. Death itself is no longer integrated into a
meaningful narrative of salvation. Rather, it is my death, and I have to
deal with it by myself. As death puts an end to my self once and for all,
Dasein – in the face of death – contracts into itself. From the constant
presence of death comes the pre-eminence of the self. The existential
paroxysm of a Dasein that is determined to realize its self generates the
necessary tension, the muscular power that protects Dasein against
the impending temporal atrophy and provides it with temporal
continuity.
Heidegger’s ‘Being-one’s-Self’ precedes narrative biographical context,
which is constructed only later. Dasein assures itself of itself before it
creates a coherent worldly story of itself. The self is not constructed out
of worldly occurrences that were already connected with each other.
‘Authentic historicality’ is founded only by the pre-narrative ‘whole of
existence stretched along’. Against temporal atrophy, Heidegger seeks a
temporal framing of existence, the ‘whole of existence stretched along in
this historicality in a way which is primordial and not lost, and which
has no need of connectedness’.7 This frame has to ensure that Dasein’s
pre-narrative unity does not disintegrate into ‘momentary actualities of
Experiences which come along successively and disappear’.8 It pulls
Dasein out of ‘the endless multiplicity of possibilities which offer
themselves as closest to one – those of comfortableness, shirking, and
taking things lightly’ – and anchors it in ‘the simplicity of its fate
[Schicksals]’.9 Having a fate means properly taking charge of one’s self.
Someone who surrenders to the ‘momentary actualities’ has no fate, no
‘authentic historicality’.
Digitalization intensi ies the atrophy of time. Reality disintegrates into
information that is relevant only brie ly. Information lives on the allure
of surprise. It thus fragments time. Our attention also becomes
fragmented. Information does not permit any lingering. In the
accelerated exchange of information, bits of information quickly
replace each other. Snapchat is the embodiment of instant digital
communication. This service is the purest expression of digital
temporality. Only the moment counts. Snaps are a synonym for
‘momentary actualities’, and accordingly they disappear after a short
while. Reality disintegrates into snaps. This removes the temporal
anchors that stabilize us. ‘Stories’ on digital platforms such as
Instagram or Facebook are not genuine stories. They have no narrative
duration. Rather, they are just sequences of momentary impressions
that do not tell us anything. They are in fact no more than bits of visual
information that quickly disappear. Nothing stays. An Instagram
advertisement says: ‘Post moments from your everyday life in your
Stories. These are fun, casual, and only last 24 hours.’ This temporal
limitation creates a peculiar psychological effect. It evokes a feeling of
leetingness, which produces a subtle compulsion to communicate
even more.
Sel ies are momentary photographs. Their only concern is the moment.
As a medium of remembrance, a sel ie is leeting visual information.
Unlike an analogue photo, it is registered only brie ly and then
disappears for good. Sel ies aim not at remembrance but at
communication. Ultimately, they announce the end of the human being
as someone with a fate and a history.
Phono sapiens surrenders to the ‘momentary actualities of Experiences
which come along successively and disappear’. The ‘whole of existence
stretched along’ – which connects birth and death and gives a life its
emphasis on the self – is alien to Phono sapiens, who does not exist
historically. The phenomenon of the funeral sel ie suggests this absence
of death. Standing next to the cof in, people smile at their cameras.
Likes can be elicited even from death. Apparently, Phono sapiens moves
beyond Homo sapiens, who was in need of salvation.
With digital platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok
and Snapchat, we approach the degree zero of narration. They are
media of information, not narration. They work in an additive rather
than narrative fashion. The strings of information do not condense into
a narrative. To the question ‘How do I add or edit a life event on my
Facebook pro ile?’ the answer is: ‘Scroll down to posts and tap life
event.’ Life events are mere bits of information. They are not woven
into an extended narrative but simply added up into a syndetic
arrangement. There is no narrative synthesis of events. On digital
platforms, lived moments cannot be digested and condensed in a
re lexive and narrative manner – and in fact this is intentional. Digital
platforms’ technical dispositif rules out time-intensive narrative
practices.
Human memory is selective. This is how it differs from a database. It is
narrative, whereas digital memories are additive and cumulative. A
narrative depends on a selection and connection of events. It proceeds
in a selective fashion. The narrative path is narrow. It comprises only
selected events. The narrated or remembered life is necessarily
incomplete. Digital platforms, by contrast, seek to create a complete
record of a life. The less narration there is, the more data and information
there are. For digital platforms, data are more valuable than narratives.
They do not want narrative re lection. When digital platforms permit
narrative formats, these must be designed so as to be compatible with
databases. They need to produce as many data as possible. The
narrative formats therefore necessarily have an additive form. ‘Stories’
are designed to be bearers of information; narrative, in the genuine
sense, disappears. The dispositif of digital platforms is: the total record
of a life. The aim is to translate a life into a dataset. The more data there
are about a person, the better that person can be surveilled, controlled
and economically exploited. Phono sapiens believe they are merely
playing, but they are in fact being utterly exploited and controlled. The
smartphone seems to be a playground, but it is a digital panopticon.
Creating an autobiographical narrative requires one to re lect on one’s
life – the conscious work of remembrance. Data and information, by
contrast, are generated in a way that bypasses consciousness. They
represent our activities immediately, without any re lective iltering. If
data are produced in a less conscious way, they are accordingly more
useful. Such data provide access to those regions that lie outside of
consciousness. They allow digital platforms to screen a person and to
control their behaviour at a pre-re lexive level.
Walter Benjamin suggested that, just as psychoanalysis discovers the
‘instinctual unconscious’, the technical possibilities of the camera, such
as slow motion, time lapses and close-ups, allow us to discover an
‘optical unconscious’.10 In a similar way, data mining acts as a digital
magnifying glass that discloses an unconscious space behind the
conscious one. We may call this space the digital unconscious. It allows
arti icial intelligence to access our unconscious desires and
inclinations. This puts data-driven psychopolitics in a position to
control our behaviour at a pre-re lexive level.11
In the case of so-called ‘self-tracking’, counting completely supplants
narration. All that self-tracking generates are data. The motto of the
Quanti ied Self movement is ‘Self-Knowledge through Numbers’. Its
adherents try to gain self-knowledge not through narration,
remembrance and re lection, but by way of counting and numbers. To
this end, the body is itted with various sensors that automatically
generate data on heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature,
movement and sleep patterns. Mental states and moods are
continuously monitored. A detailed log of all everyday activities is kept.
Even the day one notices one’s irst grey hair is recorded. Nothing must
escape the total record of a life. In all this, nothing is narrated.
Everything is measured. Sensors and apps provide data automatically,
without any linguistic representation or narrative re lection. The
collected data are then summarized in visually appealing graphics and
diagrams. These, however, do not say anything about who I am. The self
is not a quantity but a quality. ‘Self-Knowledge through Numbers’ is an
illusion. Self-knowledge can be generated only through narration. I
must narrate myself. But numbers do not narrate anything. The
expression ‘numerical narratives’ is an oxymoron. A life cannot be
captured through quanti iable events.
The third episode of the irst series of Black Mirror is called The Entire
History of You. It depicts a transparent society in which everyone wears
an implant behind the ear that records everything the wearer sees and
experiences. Everything that was seen or perceived can be replayed,
either directly to the wearer or on an external screen. At airport
security checks, for instance, the of icer asks you to replay the events of
a certain time period. Nothing is secret any more. It is impossible for
criminals to hide their crimes. People are, so to speak, captured in their
own memories. Strictly speaking, when everything that is experienced
can be repeated, remembrance is impossible.
Remembrance is not a mechanical repetition of an earlier experience
but a narrative that must be recounted again and again. Memories
necessarily have gaps. They presuppose closeness and distance. When
all experience is present and distanceless, that is, when it is available,
remembrance is impossible. The gapless repetition of past experience
is not a narrative but a report or record. To be able to narrate or
remember, one must be able to forget or leave out a great deal. The
transparency society spells the end of narrative and remembrance.
There is no such thing as a transparent narrative. Only information and
data are transparent. In the inal scene of The Entire History of You, the
protagonist takes a razor blade to himself, and cuts out the implant.
Notes
1. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 479.
2. Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. VI: Time Regained,
London: Vintage, 1996, p. 451.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Oxford: Blackwell, 1962, p.
442.
6. Ibid., p. 427.
7. Ibid., p. 442.
8. Ibid., p. 426.
9. Ibid., p. 435.
10. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its
Technological Reproducibility’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 3, pp.
101–33; here: p. 117.
11. See Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New
Technologies of Power, London: Verso, 2017.
Bare Life
The protagonist of Sartre’s Nausea, Roquentin, is one day overcome by
an unbearable nausea:
Then the Nausea seized me, I dropped to a seat, I no longer knew
where I was; I saw the colours spin slowly around me, I wanted to
vomit. And since that time, the Nausea has not left me, it holds
me.1
To Roquentin, the nausea appears to be a property of things. He picks
up a pebble and feels ‘a sort of nausea in the hands’.2 The world is
nausea: ‘The Nausea is not inside me: I feel it out there in the wall, in
the suspenders, everywhere around me. It makes itself one with the
café , I am the one who is within it.’3
Gradually, Roquentin comes to realize that it is the pure presence of the
things, sheer facticity, the contingency of the world that triggers the
nausea. Under his gaze, the meaningful relations that negate the
accidental and insigni icant nature of things disintegrate. The world
appears to him to be naked. It is divested of all meaning. His own
existence also seems meaningless:
I had appeared by chance, I existed like a stone, a plant, or
microbe. My life proceeded at random and in every direction.
Sometimes it gave me vague signals; at other times I felt nothing
more than a meaningless buzzing.4
The meaningless buzzing is unbearable. There is no music, no tone.
Everywhere there is an unbearable emptiness in which Roquentin
might suffocate. The world does not mean anything to him. Nor does he
understand it. There are no purposes; there is no ‘in-order-to’ to which
he could subject things. It is precisely the purpose, the use, the servility
of things that keeps them at a distance. Now, they impose their naked
presence on Roquentin. They develop an independence:
 Objects should not touch because they are not alive. You use them,
put them back in place, you live among them: they are useful,
nothing more. But they touch me, it is unbearable. I am afraid of
being in contact with them as though they were living beasts.5
One day, Roquentin is struck by the idea that narrating has the power
to make the world appear meaningful:
This is what I thought: for the most banal event to become an
adventure, you must (and this is enough) begin to recount it. This
is what fools people: a man is always a teller of tales, he lives
surrounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees
everything that happens to him through them; and he tries to live
his own life as if he were telling a story.
But you have to choose: live or tell.6
Only with narration is life elevated above its sheer facticity, above its
nakedness. Narrating means to make time’s passing meaningful, to
give it a beginning and an end. Without narration, life is purely additive:
Nothing happens when you live. The scenery changes, people
come in and go out, that’s all. There are no beginnings. Days are
tacked on to days without rhyme or reason, as interminable,
monotonous addition. From time to time you make a semi-total:
you say: I have been travelling for three years, I’ve been in Bouville
for three years. Neither is there any end … the procession starts
again, you begin to add up hours and days: Monday, Tuesday,
Wednesday. April, May, June. 1924, 1925, 1926.7
Modernity’s existential crisis – a crisis of narration – is caused by the
splitting of life and narrative, as summed up in the choice ‘live or tell’.
Life, it seems, can no longer be narrated. In pre-modern times, life was
anchored in narratives. In time as narration, there is not only Monday,
Tuesday, Wednesday … but also Easter, Whitsun, Christmas – narrative
points of reference. Even the days of the week have narrative meaning:
Wednesday is the day of Woden, Thursday the day of Thor and so on.
Roquentin tries to overcome the unbearable facticity of being, bare life,
by way of narrative. At the end of the book, he resolves to give up his
profession as a historian and become a writer. Writing, he believes, will
allow him to salvage the past:
A book. Naturally, at irst it would only be a troublesome, tiring
work, it wouldn’t stop me from existing or feeling that I exist. But a
time would come when the book would be written, when it would
be behind me, and I think that a little of its clarity might fall over
my past. Then, perhaps, I could remember my life without
repugnance.8
The perception of the world in narrative form is blissful. Everything
enters into a well-formed order. The narrative ‘and’ feeds off the
imagination; it unites things and events, even tri ling, insigni icant or
incidental things, into a story. Without this bringing together, which
overcomes sheer facticity, things and events would have nothing to do
with each other. But through it, the world appears rhythmically
structured. Things and events are not isolated; they are elements
belonging to a narrative. In his ‘Essay on the Jukebox’, Peter Handke
writes:
And now, as he aimlessly checked out the trails in the savanna,
suddenly an entirely new rhythm sprang up in him, not an
alternating, sporadic one, but a single, steady one, and, above all,
one that, instead of circling and lirting around, went straight and
with complete seriousness in medias res: the rhythm of narrative.
At irst he experienced everything he encountered as he went
along as narrative songs …: ‘Thistles had blown into the wire fence.
An older man with a plastic bag bent down for a mushroom. A dog
hopped by on three legs and made one think of a deer … In the
train from Zaragoza the lights were already lit, and a handful of
people sat in the carriages …’9
Elsewhere, Handke sees narrative perception that goes beyond sheer
facticity as an existential strategy for transforming frightening being-
in-the-world into familiar being-at-home – a way of imposing
connections on the isolated and unconnected. The narrative,
experienced as something divine, reveals itself to be an existential
compulsion:
 This was no longer the compelling, warming power of imagery
carrying him along, but clearly a cold compulsion, ascending from
his heart to his head, a senseless repeated hurling of himself
against a gate long since closed, and he wondered whether
narration, which had irst seemed divine, hadn’t been a snare and a
delusion – an expression of his fear in the face of all the isolated,
unconnected phenomena?10
Life in late modernity is utterly naked. It lacks narrative imagination.
Pieces of information cannot be tied together into a narrative. Things
thus break free. The coherence from which events derive their meaning
gives way to a meaningless side-by-side and one-after-the-other. There
is no narrative horizon that lifts us above mere life. Life that must be
kept ‘healthy’ and ‘optimized’ is mere survival. The manic pursuit of
health and the optimization of life can occur only in a naked and
meaningless world. Optimization is concerned only with functioning
and ef iciency. A narrative, by contrast, cannot be optimized, because it
has intrinsic value.
In digital late modernity, we conceal the nakedness – the absence of
meaning in our lives – by constantly posting, liking and sharing. The
noise of communication and information is supposed to ensure that
life’s terrifying vacuity remains hidden. Today’s crisis is expressed not
in the choice ‘live or tell’ but in the choice ‘live or post’. The reason that
people compulsively take sel ies is not narcissism. Rather, it is inner
emptiness. There is no meaning to stabilize the ego. Faced with its inner
emptiness, the ego constantly produces itself. Sel ies reproduce the self
in its empty form.
In the information and transparency society, nakedness intensi ies and
becomes obscenity. However, this is not the charged obscenity of the
repressed, prohibited or secret, but the empty obscenity of
transparency, information and communication: ‘It is the obscenity of
what no longer harbours any secret, what can be dissolved without
remainder into information and communication.’11 Information as
such is pornographic, because it has no cover. Eloquent, narrating is
only the cover, the veil that weaves itself around the things. Covering
and veiling are essential to narrative. Pornography does not tell
anything. It gets right down to it, whereas the eroticism of narrative
indulges in incidental details.
Notes
1. Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea, Norfolk CT: New Directions, 1949, p.
30.
2. Ibid., p. 20.
3. Ibid., p. 41.
4. Ibid., p. 116 (transl. amended).
5. Ibid., p. 19.
6. Ibid., p. 56.
7. Ibid., p. 57.
8. Ibid., p. 238.
9. Peter Handke, ‘Essay on the Jukebox’, in The Jukebox and Other
Essays on Storytelling, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1994, pp. 47–118; here: p. 48 (transl. modi ied).
10. Ibid., pp. 83f.
11. Jean Baudrillard, Das Andere selbst, Vienna: Passagen, 1994, p.
19.
The Disenchantment of the
World
The children’s author Paul Maar tells the story of a boy who cannot tell
stories.1 When his little sister, Susanne, is struggling to fall asleep,
tossing and turning in her bed, she asks Konrad to tell her a story. He
declines in a huff. Konrad’s parents, by contrast, love telling stories.
They are almost addicted to it, and they argue over who will go irst.
They therefore decide to keep a list, so that everyone gets a go. When
Roland, the father, has told a story, the mother puts an ‘R’ on the list.
When Olivia, the mother, tells a story, the father enters a large ‘O’. Every
now and again, a small ‘S’ inds its way on to the list in between all the
‘Rs’ and ‘Os’ – Susanne, too, is beginning to enjoy telling stories. The
family forms a small storytelling community. Konrad is the exception.
The family is particularly in the mood for stories during breakfast at
the weekend. Narrating requires leisure. Under conditions of
accelerated communication, we do not have the time, or even the
patience, to tell stories. We merely exchange information. Under more
leisurely conditions, anything can trigger a narrative. The father, for
instance, asks the mother: ‘Olivia, could you pass the jam please?’ As
soon as he grasps the jam jar, he gazes dreamily, and narrates:
This reminds me of my grandfather. One day, I might have been
eight or nine, grandpa asked for strawberry jam over lunch. Lunch,
mind you! At irst we thought we had misunderstood him, because
we were having a roast with baked potatoes, as we always did on 2
September …
‘This reminds me of …’ and ‘one day’ are the ways in which the father
introduces his narrations. Narration and remembrance cause each
other. Someone who lives completely in the moment cannot narrate
anything.
The mismatch between the roast and strawberry jam creates the
narrative tension. It invokes the whole story of someone’s life, the
drama or tragedy of a person’s biography. The profound inwardness
betrayed by the father’s dreamlike gaze nourishes the remembrance as
narration. Post-narrative time is a time without inwardness.
Information turns everything towards the outside. Instead of the
inwardness of a narrator, we have the alertness of an information
hunter.
The memory prompted by the strawberry jam is reminiscent of
Proust’s mémoire involontaire. In a hotel room in the seaside town of
Balbec, Proust bends down to untie his shoelaces, and is suddenly
confronted with an image of his late grandmother. The painful memory
of his beloved grandmother brings tears to his eyes, but it also gives
him a moment of happiness. In a mémoire involontaire, two separate
moments in time combine into one fragrant crystal of time. The
torturous contingency of time is thereby overcome, and this produces
happiness. By establishing strong connections between events, a
narrative overcomes the emptiness and leetingness of time. Narrative
time does not pass. This is why the loss of our narrative capacities
intensi ies the experience of contingency. This loss means we are
subject to transience and contingency. The memory of the
grandmother’s face is also experienced as her true image. We recognize
the truth only in hindsight. Truth has its place in remembrance as
narration.
Time is becoming increasingly atomized. Narrating a story, by contrast,
consists in establishing connections. Whoever narrates in the
Proustian sense delves into life and inwardly weaves new threads
between events. In this way, a narrator forms a dense network of
relations in which nothing remains isolated. Everything appears to be
meaningful. It is through narrative that we escape the contingency of
life.
Konrad cannot narrate because his world consists exclusively of facts.
Instead of telling stories, he enumerates these facts. When his mother
asks him about yesterday, he replies: ‘Yesterday, I was in school. First,
we had maths, then German, then biology, and then two hours of sports.
Then I went home and did my homework. Then, I spent some time at
the computer, and later I went to bed.’ His life is determined by external
events. He lacks the inwardness that would allow him to internalize
events and to weave and condense them into a story.
His little sister wants to help him. She suggests: ‘I always begin by
saying: there once was a mouse.’ Konrad immediately interrupts her:
‘Shrew, house mouse, or vole?’ Then he continues: ‘Mice belong to the
genus rodents. There are two groups. Genuine mice and voles.’
Konrad’s world is fully disenchanted. It disintegrates into facts and
loses narrative tension. The world that can be explained cannot be
narrated.
Eventually, Konrad’s mother and father realize that he cannot narrate.
They decide to send him to Ms Leishure, who taught them how to tell
stories. One rainy day, Konrad goes to see Ms Leishure. At her door, he
is welcomed by a friendly old lady with white hair and thick, still dark
eyebrows: ‘I understand that your parents have sent you to me so that
you can learn how to tell stories.’ From the outside, the house appears
to be very small, but inside there is a seemingly endless corridor. Ms
Leishure puts a parcel in Konrad’s hands and, pointing to a small
staircase, asks him to take it upstairs to her sister. Konrad ascends the
stairs, which seem to go on forever. Astonished, he asks: ‘How is this
possible? I saw the house from the outside, and it had only one loor.
We must be on the seventh by now.’ Konrad notices that he is all alone.
Suddenly, in the wall next to him a low door opens. A hoarse voice calls
out: ‘Ah, there you arse at last. Now home on and come bin!’ Everything
seems enchanted. Language itself is a strange riddle; it has something
magical about it, as if it is under a spell. Konrad pokes his head through
the door. In the darkness, he is able to make out an owlish igure.
Frightened, he asks: ‘Who … who are you?’ ‘Don’t be so purrious. Do you
want to let me wait foreven?’ the owlish creature retorts. Konrad
stoops to go through the door. ‘Soon you’ll blow downhill! Have a lice
trip!’ the voice chuckles. At that very moment, Konrad notices that the
dark room has no loor. He falls downwards through a tube at
breakneck pace. He tries in vain to ind something to hold on to, all the
time feeling as though he has been swallowed by some enormous
animal. The tube eventually spits him out at Ms Leishure’s feet. ‘What
did you do with the parcel?’ she asks angrily. ‘I must have lost it along
the way’, Konrad answers. Ms Leishure puts her hand in a pocket of her
dark dress and pulls out another parcel. Konrad could have sworn that
it was the very same one she gave him earlier. ‘Here’, Ms Leishure says
brusquely. ‘Please deliver this to my brother downstairs.’ ‘In the
basement?’ Konrad asks. ‘Nonsense’, says Ms Leishure. ‘You’ll ind him
on the ground loor. We are up on the seventh loor, as you know! Now
go!’ Konrad cautiously descends the small staircase, which again seems
to go on forever. After a hundred steps, Konrad reaches a dark corridor.
‘Hello’, he hesitantly calls out. No one answers. Konrad tries ‘Hello, Mr
Leishure! Can you hear me?’ A door next to Konrad opens, and a coarse
voice says: ‘Of course, I swear you. I’m not deaf! Quick, come wine!’ In
the dark room there is a seated igure who looks like a beaver and
smokes a cigar. The beaver creature asks: ‘What are you baiting for?
Come on nine!’ Konrad slowly enters the room. Again he falls into the
dark bowels of the house, and again they spit him out at Ms Leishure’s
feet. She draws on a thin cigar and says: ‘Let me guess? You failed to
deliver the parcel again.’ Konrad musters his courage to say: ‘No. But
anyway, I am not here to deliver parcels but to learn how to tell stories.’
‘How can I teach a boy who cannot even carry a parcel upstairs how to
tell a story! You’d better go home – you are a hopeless case’, Ms
Leishure says con idently. She opens a door in the wall next to him:
‘Have a safe journey dome and all the west’, she says, pushing him out.
Again Konrad slides down through the endless twists and turns of the
house. This time, however, he ends up not at Ms Leishure’s feet but
directly in front of his house. His parents and sister are still having
breakfast when Konrad comes rushing into the house, announcing
excitedly: ‘I have to tell you something. You will never believe what
happened to me …’. For Konrad, the world is now no longer intelligible.
It consists not of objective facts but of events that resist explanation,
and for that very reason require narration. His narrative turn makes
Konrad a member of the small narrative community. His mother and
father smile at each other. ‘There you go!’ his mother says. She puts a
big ‘K’ on the list.
Paul Maar’s story reads like a subtle social critique. It seems to lament
the fact that we have unlearned how to tell stories. And this loss of our
narrative capacity is attributed to the disenchantment of the world.
This disenchantment can be reduced to the formula: things are, but
they are mute. The magic evaporates from them. The pure facticity of
existence makes narrative impossible. Facticity and narration are
mutually exclusive.
The disenchantment of the world means irst and foremost that our
relationship to the world is reduced to causality. But causality is only
one kind of relationship. The hegemony of causality leads to a poverty
in world and experience. A magical world is one in which things enter
into relations with each other that are not ruled by causal connections
– relations in which things exchange intimacies. Causality is a
mechanical and external relation. Magical and poetic relationships to
the world rest on a deep sympathy that connects humans and things. In
The Disciples at Saïs, Novalis says:
Does not the rock become an individual ‘thou’ when I address it?
And what else am I than the river when I gaze with melancholy in
its waves, and my thoughts are lost in its course? … Whether any
one has yet understood the stones or the stars I know not, but
such a one must certainly have been a gifted being.2
For Walter Benjamin, children are the last inhabitants of a magical
world. For them, nothing merely exists. Everything is eloquent and
meaningful. A magical intimacy connects them with the world. In play,
they transform themselves into things and in this way come into close
contact with them:
Standing behind the doorway curtain, the child himself becomes
something loating and white, a ghost. The dining table under
which he is crouching turns him into the wooden idol in a temple
whose four pillars are the carved legs. And behind a door, he
himself is the door – wears it as his heavy mask, and like a shaman
will bewitch all those who unsuspectingly enter…. the apartment is
the arsenal of his masks. Yet once each year – in mysterious places,
in their empty eye sockets, in their ixed mouths – presents lie.
Magical experience becomes science. As its engineer, the child
disenchants the gloomy parental apartment and looks for Easter
eggs.3
Today, children have become profane, digital beings. The magical
experience of the world has withered. Children hunt for information,
their digital Easter eggs.
The disenchantment of the world is expressed in de-auratization. The
aura is the radiance that raises the world above its mere facticity, the
mysterious veil around things. The aura has a narrative core. Benjamin
points out that the narrative memory images of mémoire involontaire
possess an aura, whereas photographic images do not: ‘If the
distinctive feature of the images arising from mémoire involontaire is
seen in their aura, then photography is decisively implicated in the
phenomenon of a “decline of the aura”.’4
Photographs are distinguished from memory images by their lack of
narrative inwardness. Photographs represent what is there without
internalizing it. They do not mean anything. Memory as narration, by
contrast, does not represent a spatiotemporal continuum. Rather, it is
based on a narrative selection. Unlike photography, memory is
decidedly arbitrary and incomplete. It expands or contracts temporal
distances. It leaves out years or decades.5 Narrativity is opposed to
logical facticity.
Following a suggestion in Proust, Benjamin believes that things retain
within themselves the gaze that looked on them.6 They themselves
thus become gaze-like. The gaze helps to weave the auratic veil that
surrounds things. Aura is the ‘distance of the gaze that is awakened in
what is looked at’.7 When looked at intently, things return our gaze:
The person we look at, or who feels he is being looked at, looks at
us in turn. To experience the aura of an object we look at means to
invest it with the ability to look back at us. This ability
corresponds to the data of mémoire involontaire.8
When things lose their aura, they lose their magic – they neither look at
us nor speak to us. They are no longer a ‘thou’ but a mute ‘it’. We no
longer exchange gazes with the world.
When they are submerged in the luid medium of mémoire involontaire,
things become fragrant vessels in which what was seen and felt is
condensed in narrative fashion. Names, too, take on an aura and
narrate: ‘A name read long ago in a book contains within its syllables
the strong wind and brilliant sunshine that prevailed while we were
reading it.’9 Words, too, can radiate an aura. Benjamin quotes Karl
Kraus: ‘The closer one looks at a word, the greater the distance from
which it looks back.’10
Today, we primarily perceive the world with a view to getting
information. Information has neither distance nor expanse. It cannot
hold rough winds or dazzling sunshine. It lacks auratic space.
Information therefore de-auratizes and disenchants the world. When
language decays into information, it loses its aura. Information is the
endpoint of atrophied language.
Memory is a narrative practice that connects events in novel
combinations and creates a network of relations. The tsunami of
information destroys narrative inwardness. De-narrativized memories
resemble ‘junk-shops – great dumps of images of all kinds and origins,
used and shop-soiled symbols, piled up any old how’.11 The things in a
junk shop are a chaotic, disorderly heap. The heap is the counter- igure
of narrative. Events coalesce into a story only when they are strati ied in
a particular way. Heaps of data or information are storyless. They are
not narrative but cumulative.
The story is the counter- igure of information insofar as it has a
beginning and an end. It is characterized by closure. It is a concluding
form:
There is an essential – as I see it – distinction between stories, on
the one hand, which have as their goal, an end, completeness,
closure, and, on the other hand, information, which is always, by
de inition, partial, incomplete, fragmentary.12
A completely unbounded world lacks enchantment and magic.
Enchantment depends on boundaries, transitions and thresholds.
Susan Sontag writes:
For there to be completeness, unity, coherence, there must be
borders. Everything is relevant in the journey we take within those
borders. One could describe the story’s end as a point of magical
convergence for the shifting preparatory views: a ixed position
from which the reader sees how initially disparate things inally
belong together.13
Narrative is a play of light and shadow, of the visible and invisible, of
nearness and distance. Transparency destroys this dialectical tension,
which forms the basis of every narrative. The digital disenchantment of
the world goes far beyond the disenchantment that Max Weber
attributed to scienti ic rationalization. Today’s disenchantment is the
result of the informatization of the world. Transparency is the new
formula of disenchantment. Transparency disenchants the world by
dissolving it into data and information.
In an interview, Paul Virilio mentions a science- iction short story
about the invention of a tiny camera. It is so small and light that it can
be transported by a snow lake. Extraordinary numbers of these
cameras are mixed into arti icial snow and then dropped from
aeroplanes. People think it is snowing, but in fact the world is being
contaminated with cameras. The world becomes fully transparent.
Nothing remains hidden. There are no more blind spots. Asked what
we will dream of when everything becomes visible, Virilio answers:
‘We’ll dream of being blind.’14 There is no such thing as a transparent
narrative. Every narrative needs secrets and enchantment. Only our
dreams of blindness would save us from the hell of transparency, would
return to us the capacity to narrate.
Gershom Scholem concludes one of his books on Jewish mysticism
with a Hasidic tale:
 When the Baal Shem had a dif icult task before him, he would go to
a certain place in the woods, light a ire and meditate in prayer –
and what he had set out to perform was done. When a generation
later the ‘Maggid’ of Meseritz was faced with the same task he
would go to the same place in the woods and say: We can no longer
light the ire, but we can still speak the prayers – and what he
wanted done became reality. Again a generation later Rabbi Moshe
Leib of Sassov had to perform this task. And he too went into the
woods and said: We can no longer light a ire, nor do we know the
secret meditations belonging to the prayer, but we do know the
place in the woods to which it all belongs – and that must be
suf icient; and suf icient it was. But when another generation had
passed and Rabbi Israel of Rishin was called upon to perform the
task, he sat down on his golden chair in his castle and said: We
cannot light the ire, we cannot speak the prayers, we do not know
the place, but we can tell the story of how it was done. And, the
story-teller adds, the story which he told had the same effect as
the actions of the other three.15
Theodor W. Adorno quotes this Hasidic tale in full in his ‘Gruß an
Gershom Scholem: Zum 70. Geburtstag’ [Greetings to Gershom
Scholem on his seventieth birthday].16 He interprets the story as a
metaphor for the advance of secularization in modernity. The world
becomes increasingly disenchanted. The mythical ire has long since
burnt itself out. We no longer know how to say prayers. We are not able
to engage in secret meditation. The mythical place in the woods has
also been forgotten. Today, we must add to this list: we are losing the
capacity to tell the story through which we can invoke this mythical
past.
Notes
1. Paul Maar, ‘Die Geschichte vom Jungen, der keine Geschichten
erzä hlen konnte’, in Die Zeit, 28 October 2004.
2. Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), ‘The Disciples at Saı̈s’, in
The Disciples at Saïs and Other Fragments, London: Methuen,
1903, pp. 91–143; here p. 129 (transl. modi ied).
3. Walter Benjamin, ‘One-Way Street’, in Selected Writings, Vol. 1,
1913–1926, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 444–
88; here: pp. 465f.
4. Walter Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, in Selected
Writings, Vol. 4, 1938–1940, Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press, 2003, pp. 313–55; here: p. 338.
5. See Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays,
Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, pp. 50f.
6. See Proust, Time Regained, p. 241: ‘Certain people, whose minds
are prone to mystery, like to believe that objects retain
something of the eyes which have looked at them, that old
buildings and pictures appear to us not as they originally were
but beneath a perceptible veil woven for them over the
centuries by the love and contemplation of millions of
admirers.’
7. Benjamin, The Arcades Project, p. 314 (transl. amended).
8. Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, p. 338.
9. Proust, Time Regained, p. 241.
10. Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, p. 354 (note 77).
11. Paul Virilio, The Information Bomb, London: Verso, 2005, p. 38.
12. Susan Sontag, ‘At the Same Time: The Novelist and Moral
Reasoning’, in At the Same Time: Essays and Speeches, New York:
 Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, pp. 210–31; here: p. 224.
13. Ibid.
14. Paul Virilio, ‘Cyberwar, God and Television: An Interview with
Paul Virilio’, in Arthur and Marilouise Kroker (eds), Digital
Delirium, Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1997, pp. 41–8;
here: p. 47.
15. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, New York:
Schocken, 1995 [1946], pp. 349f.
16. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Gruß an G. Scholem. Zum 70. Geburtstag’,
in Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 20.2, Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1997, pp. 478–86.
From Shocks to Likes
In his essay ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, Walter Benjamin quotes
from a short prose piece by Baudelaire, ‘Perte d’auré ole’ [Loss of a
Halo]. It tells the story of a poet who loses his halo while crossing a
boulevard:
A short while ago I was hurrying across the boulevard, and amid
that churning chaos in which death comes galloping at you from all
sides at once I must have made an awkward movement, for the
halo slipped off my head and fell into the mire of the macadam.1
Benjamin interprets the story as an allegory of the disintegration of the
aura in modernity. Baudelaire ‘named the price for which the sensation
of modernity could be had: the disintegration of the aura in immediate
shock experience [Chockerlebnis]’.2 Reality impacts on the observer via
the shock. Its representation moves from the canvas to the projection
screen. A painting invites the observer to linger in front of it in
contemplation and to enter into free association. The observers rest in
themselves. The spectator at the movies, by contrast, resembles the
pedestrian in the middle of chaotic traf ic where death approaches on
all sides: ‘Film is the art form corresponding to the increased threat to
life that faces people today.’3
According to Freud, the main function of consciousness is to protect us
against stimuli. Consciousness tries to assign the received stimulus a
place within itself, at the expense of the integrity of the conscious
material. Benjamin quotes Freud:
For a living organism, protection against stimuli is almost more
important than the reception of stimuli. The protective shield is
equipped with its own store of energy and must above all strive to
preserve the special forms of conversion of energy operating in it
against the effects of the excessive energies at work in the
external world-effects that tend toward an equalization of
potential and hence toward destruction.
‘The threat posed by these energies’, Benjamin says, ‘is the threat of
shocks. The more readily consciousness registers these shocks, the
less likely they are to have a traumatic effect.’4 Consciousness prevents
stimuli from reaching the deeper layers of the psyche. When
consciousness’s protection against stimuli fails, we suffer a traumatic
shock. Dreaming and remembering are delayed ways of coming to
terms with such shocks. They take the time that was originally lacking
and deal with the stimuli in hindsight. If consciousness succeeds in
parrying the shock, the impact of the occurrence is weakened, and it
becomes an event. In the modern age, the shock aspect of individual
impressions has become so intensi ied that our consciousness is
forced to be permanently active as a shield against stimuli. The more it
succeeds in this endeavour, the less the stimuli become part of our
experience. Experiences [Erfahrungen] are replaced with events
[Erlebnisse], that is, with attenuated shocks. The eye of the modern city
dweller is overburdened with protective tasks. It unlearns
contemplative lingering: ‘In the protective eye, there is no
daydreaming surrender to distance and to faraway things.’5
Benjamin turns the experience of shocks into Baudelaire’s poetic
principle. Baudelaire
speaks of a duel in which the artist, just before being beaten,
screams in fright. This duel is the creative process itself. Thus,
Baudelaire placed shock experience [Chockerfahrung] at the very
center of his art… . Since Baudelaire was himself vulnerable to
being frightened, it was not unusual for him to evoke fright. Valles
tells us about his eccentric grimaces … Gautier speaks of the
italicizing Baudelaire indulged in when reciting poetry; Nadar
describes his jerky gait.
According to Benjamin, Baudelaire was one of those ‘traumatophile
types’. He ‘made it his business to parry the shocks … with his spiritual
and physical self’.6 He ‘stabs away’ with his pencil.
More than 100 years have passed since Benjamin published his essay
on Baudelaire. The screens on which movies played have been replaced
by digital screens that we look at almost constantly. Etymologically, a
screen [Schirm] is a protective barrier. A screen bans reality, which
becomes an image, thus screening us off from it. We perceive reality
almost exclusively via digital screens. Reality has become merely a
section of the screen. On a smartphone screen, reality is so attenuated
that it can no longer create any shock experiences. Shocks give way to
likes.
Because it removes reality’s gaze, the smartphone is a most ef icient
tool for screening us off from reality. Reality’s gaze is the gaze through
which the other addresses us. Reality as something facing us disappears
entirely behind the touchscreen. Deprived of its otherness, the other
becomes consumable. According to Lacan, a picture still possesses a
gaze that looks at me, captures me, enchants and fascinates me, that
puts me under its spell and takes hold of my eyes: ‘certainly, in the
picture, something of the gaze is always manifested’.7 Lacan
distinguishes between the gaze and the eyes. The eyes construct an
imaginary mirror image that the gaze crosses out.
A countenance demands distance. It is a thou and not an available it. It is
possible to put one’s inger on the picture of a person, or even erase it,
only because it has already lost its gaze – the countenance. Lacan
would say that the picture on the touchscreen is without gaze, that it
serves only to please my eyes and satisfy my needs. In this, the
touchscreen differs from the picture as a screen (écran) behind which
the gaze still remains visible. Because the digital screen completely
seals us off from reality, nothing remains visible behind it. The digital
screen is lat.
Every theory of the picture re lects the society to which it belongs.
During Lacan’s time, the world was still experienced as having a gaze.
In Heidegger, we also ind formulations that sound odd today. In ‘The
Origin of the Work of Art’ (1935–6), he writes about ‘equipment’ [Zeug],
such as an axe, jug or shoes: ‘Serviceability is the basic trait from out of
which these kinds of beings look at us – that is, lash at us and thereby
presence and so be the beings they are.’8 In fact, it is serviceability that
makes the being-present of beings disappear, because we perceive
equipment only with regard to its purpose. Heidegger’s ‘equipment’
still retains the dimension of a gaze. It is something facing us, looking at
us.
The disappearance of the gaze accompanies the narcissization of
perception. Narcissism removes the gaze, that is, the other, and puts an
imaginary mirror image in its place. Smartphones accelerate the
expulsion of the other. They are digital mirrors that bring about a post-
infantile return of the mirror stage. The use of smartphones means that
we remain in a mirror stage that upholds an imaginary ego. The digital
subjects Lacan’s triad of the real, the imaginary and the symbolic to a
radical reconstruction. It dismantles the real and replaces the symbolic,
which embodies shared values and norms, with the imaginary.
Ultimately, the digital leads to the erosion of community.
In the age of Net lix, no one speaks of having shock experiences in
connection with ilms. A Net lix series is nothing like a piece of art that
corresponds to a pronounced danger to life and limb. Rather, it typically
leads to binge watching. Viewers are fattened like consumer cattle.
Binge watching is a paradigm for the general mode of perception in
digital late modernity.
The transformation from shocks to likes can also be derived from a
change in our psychic apparatus. It may be true that the increasing
sensory overload in modernity is experienced as a shock. But over
time, the psychic apparatus gets used to the increased stimuli, and
perception becomes accordingly dulled. The cortex of the brain where
our defences against stimuli are located becomes calloused, so to
speak. The outermost layer of consciousness hardens and becomes ‘to
some degree inorganic’.9
The type of artist represented by Baudelaire, someone who
inadvertently causes fright, would today seem not only antiquated but
almost grotesque. The artist who typi ies our age is Jeff Koons. He
appears smart. His works re lect the smooth consumer world that is
the opposite of the world of shocks. All Koons wants from his audience
is a simple ‘Wow!’ His art is intentionally relaxed and disarming. What
he wants above all is to be liked. His motto is: ‘embrace the viewer’.
There is nothing in his art that is intended to frighten or rattle the
viewer. His art is located beyond the world of shocks. Its aim, Koons
says, is ‘communication’. He could also have said: the watchword of my
art is the like.
Notes
1. Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, p. 342.
2. Ibid., p. 343.
3. Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological
Reproducibility’, p. 281 (note 42).
4. Benjamin, ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, p. 317.
5. Ibid., p. 341.
6. Ibid., p. 319.
7. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI, New
York: W. W. Norton, 1998 [1973], p. 101.
8. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in Off the
Beaten Track, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002,
pp. 1–56; here: p. 10.
9. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, New York: W. W.
Norton, 1961, p. 21.
Theory as Narrative
In his essay ‘The End of Theory’, Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of
Wired, claims that incredibly large amounts of data make theories
super luous: ‘Today companies like Google, which have grown up in an
era of massively abundant data, don’t have to settle for wrong models.
Indeed, they don’t have to settle for models at all.’1 Human behaviour,
he writes, can be precisely predicted and controlled with the help of
data-driven psychology or sociology. The place of theory is taken by
direct correlations between data:
Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to
sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows
why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can
track and measure it with unprecedented idelity. With enough
data, the numbers speak for themselves.
But big data does not explain anything. Big data merely discloses
correlations between things. Correlations are the most primitive form
of knowledge. They do not allow us to understand anything. Big data
cannot explain why things are correlated in the way they are. It does
not establish causal or conceptual connections. The question ‘why?’ is
replaced with a non-conceptual ‘this-is-how-it-is’.
As a narrative, theory designs an order of things, setting them in
relation to each other. Theory thereby explains why they behave the
way they do. It develops conceptual contexts that make things
intelligible. Unlike big data, theory offers us the highest form of
knowledge: comprehension. Theory is a form of closure that takes hold of
things and thereby makes them graspable. Big data, by contrast, is
completely open. Theory, as a form of closure, comprises things within a
conceptual framework and thus makes them graspable. The end of
theory ultimately means the end of concept as spirit [Begriff als Geist].
Arti icial intelligence can do without the conceptual. Intelligence is not
spirit. Only spirit is capable of a reordering of things, of creating a new
narrative. Intelligence computes and counts. Spirit, however, recounts.
Data-driven human sciences [Geisteswissenschaften] are not sciences
of spirit but data science. Data drive out spirit. Data-knowledge marks
the degree zero of spirit. In a world saturated with data and information,
our narrative capacity withers. Fewer theories are therefore
formulated – no one wants to take the risk of putting forward a theory.
That a theory is actually a narrative is clear from the work of Sigmund
Freud. His psychoanalysis is a narrative that offers a model for
explaining the workings of our psychic apparatus. He subjects his
patients’ stories to his psychoanalytic narrative, which allows us to
understand a particular kind of behaviour or a particular symptom. The
cure is said to be successful when the patient accepts the narrative that
he offers them. The case histories, as told by his patients, and his
psychoanalytic narrative interact with each other. The psychoanalytic
narrative is continually retold in light of the material Freud is trying to
interpret. The stories told by the patients are meant to be fully
absorbed by Freud’s narrative. In this process, Freud becomes the hero
of his own narrative:
As a re-teller of that which has been told to him in a distorted way,
he proves to be more than simply the person who brings all
inconsistent information into focus, weighing and ordering it. He
is never in danger of being impacted by the story, as he never loses
his interpretive distance from any potential repercussions. We
might even claim that the more the material to be interpreted
threatens to escape his grasp, the more stubbornly he insists on
his explanatory psychoanalytic formulas. And in doing so, he
reveals himself as the hidden hero of his own analytic narratives.2
Plato’s dialogues are an early illustration of the fact that philosophy is
also a narrative. Plato may often, in the name of truth, be critical of
myth as narrative, but paradoxically he frequently makes use of
mythical stories himself. In some of his dialogues they play a central
role. In Phaedo, for instance, Plato tells the story of the soul’s fate after
death, just as Dante does in his Divine Comedy. Sinners are condemned
to eternal torture and ‘hurled into Tartarus’.3 Only the virtuous go to
heaven after their death. Plato concludes his elaborations on the fate of
the soul after death by saying:
 No sensible man would insist that these things are as I have
described them, but I think it is itting for a man to risk the belief –
for the risk is a noble one – that this, or something like this, is true
about our souls and their dwelling places, since the soul is
evidently immortal, and a man should repeat this to himself as if it
were an incantation, which is why I have been prolonging my tale
[mythos].4
Philosophy, in the form of ‘poetry’ (mythos), takes a risk, a noble risk. It
narrates – even risks to suggest – a new form of life and being.
Descartes’s ego cogito, ergo sum introduces a new order of things that
represents the beginning of modern times. By leaving the Christian
narrative of the Middle Ages behind, the radical orientation towards
certainty risks something new. Enlightenment is also a narrative. Kant’s
moral theory, likewise, is a very risky narrative in which a moral God
ensures that happiness is ‘distributed in exact proportion to morality’.5
God compensates us for our renunciation of earthly pleasures and
pursuit of virtue. Kant’s postulate of the soul’s immortality is also a
risky narrative. The ‘production of the highest good’, Kant argues, is
‘possible only on the presupposition of the existence and personality of
the same rational being continuing endlessly’, because ‘the complete
conformity of dispositions with the moral law’ is ‘a perfection of which
no rational being of the sensible world is capable at any moment of his
existence’. That is, Kant postulates an ‘endless progress’ in which the
human being, even beyond death, seeks to achieve the ‘highest good’.6
As far as the immortality of the soul is concerned, Kant’s moral theory,
as a tale, does not fundamentally differ from Plato’s myth. But unlike
Kant, Plato explicitly emphasizes that it is a narrative (mythos).
New narratives allow for new forms of perception. Nietzsche’s
revaluation of all values opens up a new perspective on the world. The
world is, so to speak, re-narrated, and as a result we see it with fresh
eyes. Nietzsche’s The Gay Science is anything but a science in the
narrow sense. It is conceived as a narrative about the future that is
based on a ‘hope’, on a ‘faith in a tomorrow and a day after tomorrow’.
Nietzsche’s revaluation of all values is a narrative as risk and festival,
even as adventure. In the preface to The Gay Science, Nietzsche writes:
 ‘Gay Science’: this signi ies the saturnalia of a mind that has
patiently resisted a terrible, long pressure – patiently, severely,
coldly, without yielding, but also without hope – and is now all of a
sudden attacked by hope, by hope for health, by the intoxication of
recovery. Is it any wonder that in the process much that is
unreasonable and foolish comes to light, much wanton tenderness,
lavished even on problems that have a prickly hide, not made to be
fondled and lured? This entire book is really nothing but an
amusement after long privation and powerlessness, the jubilation
of returning strength, of a reawakened faith in a tomorrow and a
day after tomorrow, of a sudden sense and anticipation of a future,
of impending adventures, of reopened seas, of goals that are
permitted and believed in again.7
Nietzsche, the narrator, speci ically emphasizes his authorship: ‘I have
it in my hands, I have a hand for switching perspectives: which is why,
for me alone, the revaluation of values was possible at all.’8 Only to the
extent that a theory is also a narrative can it be a passion. It is precisely
because arti icial intelligence is incapable of passion, of passionate
narration, that it cannot think.
Once philosophy claims to be a science, an exact science even, decay
sets in. Conceived as a science, philosophy denies its original narrative
character and it loses its language. Philosophy falls silent. An academic
philosophy that limits itself to the administration of its own history is
unable to narrate. It does not run any risks; it runs a bureaucracy. The
current crisis of narration thus also takes hold of philosophy and puts
an end to it. We lack the courage for philosophy, the courage for theory,
that is, the courage to create a narrative. We must always bear in mind
that, in the inal analysis, thinking is also a narrating that progresses in
narrative steps.
Notes
1. Chris Anderson, ‘The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the
Scienti ic Method Obsolete’, Wired, 23 July 2008, at
https://www.wired.com/2008/06/pb-theory
2. Elisabeth Bronfen: ‘Theory as Narrative: Sigmund Freud’, in
Dieter Mersch, Silvia Sasse and Sandro Zanetti (eds), Aesthetic
Theory, Zurich: Diaphanes, 2019, pp. 53–68; here: p. 55.
3. Plato, Phaedo, in Complete Works, Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997,
pp. 49–100; here: p. 96 (113e).
4. Ibid., p. 97 (114d).
5. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015, p. 90.
6. Ibid., pp. 98f.
7. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2001, p. 3.
8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1887–1889,
Kritische Studienausgabe, Vol. 13, Berlin: de Gruyter, 1988, p.
630. Transl. note: See the almost, but not quite, identical
wording in Ecce Homo (The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of
the Idols, and Other Writings, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005, p. 76): ‘I have a hand for switching perspectives:
the irst reason why a “revaluation of values” is even possible,
perhaps for me alone.’ The English translation of Ecce Homo
leaves out ‘Ich habe es jetzt in der Hand’ [I now have it in my
hands, …]. Note the addition of ‘now’ (jetzt) and the change
from past to present tense (‘was’ to ‘is’ possible).
Narration as Healing
In one of his ‘thought igures’, Walter Benjamin invokes the primordial
scene of healing: ‘The child is sick. His mother puts him to bed and sits
down beside him. And then she begins to tell him stories.’ Telling
stories is healing because it creates deep relaxation and primordial
trust. The loving voice of the mother soothes the child, strokes the
child’s soul, strengthens their bond, supports the child. Children’s
stories, moreover, tell of an ideal world; they turn the world into a
familiar home. A standard children’s story plot line relates the happy
overcoming of a crisis. This helps the child to get over the crisis that
the illness represents.
The hand that narrates is also healing. Benjamin speaks of the ‘strange
healing powers’ that emanate from the woman’s hands, which move as
if telling of something: ‘Their movements are highly expressive. But it
is not possible to describe their expression … It is as if they were telling
a story.’ Every illness is the sign of an inner blockage that can be
released through the rhythm of narration. The hand that tells a story
releases tension, blockages and hardenings. It puts things back into
balance, even lets them low again. Benjamin wonders ‘whether every
illness might be cured if it could only loat along the river of narrative –
until it reached the mouth’. Pain is a dam that offers an initial
resistance to the narrative low. But the narrative low swells and
eventually becomes strong enough to break the dam. Then, the low
takes with it everything along the way to the ‘ocean of blissful oblivion’.
The stroking hand ‘marks out a bed for this torrent’. Benjamin points
out ‘that the story a sick man tells the doctor at the start of his
treatment can become the irst stage in the healing process’.1
Freud, too, understands pain as a symptom of a blockage in a person’s
history. The person is unable to continue their story. Psychological
disorders are symptoms of a blocked story. The healing consists in the
liberation of the patient from this narrative block, in bringing what
cannot be narrated to linguistic expression. The patient is cured the
moment she narrates herself free.
Narratives develop healing powers. Benjamin mentions the Merseburg
charms, the second of which was intended as a magical healing
procedure. It is not, however, an abstract formula. Rather, it tells the
story of a wounded horse and Wotan’s use of a magic spell. Benjamin
notes: ‘It is not simply that they repeat Wotan’s formula; in addition,
they narrate the situation which led him to use it in the irst place.’2
A traumatic experience can be overcome by integrating it into a
religious narrative that provides consolation or hope and thus carries
us through the crisis. Crisis narratives help us to come to terms with
catastrophic events by embedding them in meaningful contexts.
Conspiracy theories also have a therapeutic function. They offer simple
explanations for the complex situations that are responsible for crises.
Conspiracy theories are therefore stories mostly told in times of crisis.
When crisis threatens, narration per se has a therapeutic effect,
because it places the situation in the past. As part of the past, it no
longer affects the present. The situation is put to bed, so to speak.
Hannah Arendt prefaces the chapter on action in The Human Condition
with an unusual line from Isak Dinesen: ‘All sorrows can be borne if you
put them into a story or tell a story about them.’3 Narrative phantasy is
healing. By placing our sorrows under the narrative light, it takes away
their oppressive facticity. They are absorbed by narrative rhythms and
melodies. A story raises them above mere facticity. Instead of
solidifying into a mental block, they liquefy in the narrative low.
Today’s storytelling cannot prevent the disappearance of the narrative
atmosphere. At doctors’ surgeries, scarcely a story is told. Doctors have
neither the time nor the patience to listen. The spirit of narration does
not it with the logic of ef iciency. Only in psychotherapy and
psychoanalysis are there still moments reminiscent of the healing
powers of storytelling. Michael Ende’s character Momo is able to heal
people simply by listening to them. She has plenty of time: ‘Time was
Momo’s only form of wealth.’4 She gives her time to the other. The time
of the other is a good time. Momo is the ideal listener:
 No, what Momo was better at than anyone else was listening.
Anyone can listen, you may say – what’s so special about that? –
but you’d be wrong. Very few people know how to listen properly,
and Momo’s way of listening was quite unique.5
Momo’s friendly, attentive silence invokes in others ideas that would
otherwise never have occurred to them:
It wasn’t that she actually said anything or asked questions that
put such ideas into their heads. She simply sat there and listened
with utmost attention and sympathy, ixing them with her big,
dark eyes, and they suddenly became aware of ideas they had
never suspected.6
Momo allows others to narrate themselves free. She heals by removing
narrative blockages:
Another time, a little boy brought her his canary because it
wouldn’t sing. Momo found that a far harder proposition. She had
to sit and listen to the bird for a whole week before it started to
trill and warble again.7
Listening is in the irst instance directed at the other person, the who of
the other, not at the content that is communicated. Momo’s deep and
friendly gaze addresses the others explicitly in their otherness.
Listening is not a passive state; it is an active doing. It inspires the other
to narrate and opens up a resonating space in which the narrator feels
addressed, heard, even loved.
Touch also has healing powers. Like storytelling, touching creates
closeness and primordial trust. As a tactile narrative, a touch releases
tensions and blockages that lead to pain and illness. The physician
Viktor von Weizsä cker invokes a primordial scene of healing:
 When a sister, still very young herself, sees her little brother in
pain, she senses what to do before knowing anything: her hand
inds its way; she wants to caress him where it hurts – thus, the
little Samaritan becomes the irst doctor. A pre-knowledge about a
primal effect is unconsciously at work in her. That knowledge
guides her urge towards her hand and leads the hand to perform
the soothing caress. For that is what the brother will experience;
the hand will soothe him. Between himself and the pain slips the
sensation of being touched by the sisterly hand, and the pain
retreats before this new sensation.8
The hand that touches has the same healing powers as the voice that
narrates. It creates closeness and trust. It releases tension and removes
fear.
We currently live in a society in which there is no touching. Touching
someone presupposes the otherness of the other, which places them
beyond simple availability. We cannot touch a consumable object – we
take hold of it or take it into our possession. In particular, the
smartphone, the embodiment of the digital dispositif, creates the
illusion of universal availability. Its consumerist habitus takes hold in
every sphere of life. It robs others of their otherness and reduces them
to consumable objects.
The retreat of touch is making us ill. Lacking touch, we remain
hopelessly entrapped in our ego. Touch in the proper sense pulls us out
of our ego. Poverty in touch ultimately means poverty in world. It
makes us depressive, lonely and fearful. Digitalization intensi ies this
poverty in touch and world. Paradoxically, the rise of connectivity
separates us. That is the hopeless dialectic of connection. Being
connected is not the same thing as being united.
‘Stories’ on social media, which are in fact mere self-promotion,
separate people from each other. Unlike narratives, they produce
neither closeness nor empathy. In the end, they are information
adorned with images – information that is brie ly registered and then
disappears. The stories do not narrate; they advertise. Vying for
attention does not create community. In the age of storytelling as
storyselling, narration and advertisement become indistinguishable.
That is the current crisis of narration.
Notes
1. All quotations from Walter Benjamin, ‘Storytelling and Healing’,
in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 2, pp. 724f.
2. Ibid. (transl. amended; emphasis B.-C. Han).
3. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago: Chicago
University Press, 1998 [1958], p. 175. Transl. note: The
quotation is from an interview with Karen Blixen conducted by
Bent Mohn (‘Talk with Isak Dinesen’, The New York Times Book
Review, 3 November 1957): ‘I am not a novelist, really not even
a writer; I am a storyteller. One of my friends said about me that
I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or
tell a story about them, and perhaps this is not entirely untrue.
To me, the explanation of life seems to be its melody, its
pattern. And I feel in life such an in inite, truly inconceivable
fantasy.’ Karen Blixen and Isak Dinesen are two pen names of
Karen Christenze von Blixen-Finecke.
4. Michael Ende, Momo, New York: Doubleday & Company Inc.,
1985, p. 12.
5. Ibid., p. 11.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid., pp. 15f.
8. Viktor von Weizsä cker, ‘Die Schmerzen’, in Der Arzt und der
Kranke: Stücke einer medizinischen Anthropologie, Gesammelte
Schriften, Vol. 5, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987, pp. 27–
47; here p. 27.
Narrative Community
In his essay Behutsame Ortsbestimmung [A careful de inition of a place],
Pé ter Ná das describes a village with an ancient wild pear tree at its
centre. On warm summer nights, the villagers meet under the tree and
tell each other stories. The village is a narrative community. The
stories, with the values and norms they carry, unite the people. The
narrative community is a community without communication: ‘You get
the feeling that life here does not consist of personal experiences … but
of a deep keeping of silence.’1 Under the pear tree, the villagers indulge
in ‘ritual contemplation’, a ritual silence, and give their blessings to the
‘content of collective consciousness’: ‘They do not have opinions on
this or that, but incessantly tell just one great story.’2 At the end of his
essay, Ná das, not without some regret, writes: ‘On warm summer
nights, quiet singing could be heard from under the wild pear tree. The
villagers sang quietly…. Today, there are no chosen trees, and the song
of the village has faded.’3
In Ná das’s narrative community, a community without communication,
there is a silence, a silent unity. It is the exact opposite of today’s
information society. We no longer tell each other stories. Instead, we
communicate incessantly. We post, share and like. The ‘ritual
contemplation’ that blesses the content of collective consciousness
gives way to the intoxication of communication and information. The
noise of communication silences the song in which all villagers join, the
one great story that unites them. Community without communication
gives way to communication without community.
Stories create social cohesion. They offer meaning and bear values that
create community. They must be distinguished from those narratives
that found a regime. The narratives on which the neoliberal regime is
based prevent the formation of community. The neoliberal narrative of
performance turns every individual into an entrepreneur of his own self.
Everyone competes with everyone else. The performance narrative
does not produce social cohesion – it does not produce a we. On the
contrary, it destroys solidarity and empathy. By separating individuals
from one another, the neoliberal narratives of self-optimization, self-
realization and authenticity destabilize society. When everyone
worships the self, is a priest of themselves, when everyone plays to the
gallery, gives a performance of themselves, no stable community can
form.
Myths are ritually staged shared narratives.
However, not all narrative communities are mythbased communities
that involve a shared collective consciousness. On the basis of
narratives about the future, modern societies can create dynamic
narrative communities that allow for change. Conservative and
nationalist narratives that are directed against liberal permissiveness
are exclusionary and discriminatory. But not all community-founding
narratives are based on the exclusion of the other. There are also
inclusive narratives that do not cling to a particular identity. For
example, the radical universalism of Kant’s philosophical sketch
Perpetual Peace amounts to a master narrative in which all human
beings and nations are included and united in a world community. Kant
bases perpetual peace on the ideas of ‘cosmopolitan right’ and
‘universal hospitality’.4 According to these ideas,
all men are entitled to present themselves in the society of others
by virtue of their right to communal possession of the earth’s
surface. Since the earth is a globe, they cannot disperse over an
in inite area, but must necessarily tolerate one another’s company.
And no-one originally has any greater right than anyone else to
occupy any particular portion of the earth.5
In this universalist narrative, there can be no refugees. Every human
being enjoys unlimited hospitality. Everyone is a cosmopolitan. Novalis
is another thinker who argues for a radical universalism. He imagines a
‘world family’ beyond nation or identity. He takes poetry to be the
medium of reconciliation and love. Poetry unites people and things in
the most intimate community:
 Poetry elevates each single thing through a particular combination
with the rest of the whole … poetry shapes the beautiful society –
the world family – the beautiful household of the universe…. The
individual lives in the whole and the whole in the individual.
Through poetry there arises the highest sympathy and common
activity, the most intimate communion of the inite and the
in inite.6
This most intimate community is a narrative community, but it rejects
exclusionary narratives of identity.
Because we lack suf iciently strong communal narratives, our late
modern societies are unstable. Without a shared narrative, the
political, which makes shared action possible, cannot properly form. In
the neoliberal regime, the shared narrative gradually disintegrates into
private narratives, models of self-realization. The neoliberal regime
prevents the formation of community-founding narratives. In the name
of performance and productivity, it separates human beings from one
another. As a result, we have few narratives that could serve to found
community and meaning. The proliferation of private narratives
erodes community. Stories on social media, which make the private
public, undermine the political public sphere and make the formation of
shared narratives even more dif icult.
Political action in the genuine sense presupposes a narrative. The
action must be narratable. Without a narrative, action deteriorates
into contingent acts or reactions. Political action presupposes
narrative coherence. Hannah Arendt explicitly links action to narration:
For action and speech, which, as we saw before, belonged close
together in the Greek understanding of politics, are indeed the two
activities whose end result will always be a story with enough
coherence to be told, no matter how accidental or haphazard the
single events and their causation may appear to be.7
Today, narratives are becoming more and more depoliticized. They
mainly serve to create a society based on singularities – cultural
singularities such as singular objects, styles, places, collectives or
products.8 As a consequence, they are no longer a force that forms
community. Shared action, the we, is based on narrative. Narratives
now mainly serve commercial interests. Storytelling as storyselling
creates not a narrative community but a consumer society. Narratives
are produced and consumed like commodities. Consumers do not form
a community, a we. The commercialization of narratives robs them of
their political force. When certain goods are embellished with moral
narratives such as ‘fair trade’, even morality becomes consumable. The
moral narrative becomes information, and is sold and consumed as a
product’s distinguishing feature. Moral consumption, mediated by
narratives, increases only our own sense of self-worth. Through these
narratives, we refer not to a community that is to be improved, but
only to our own egos.
Notes
1. Pé ter Ná das, Behutsame Ortsbestimmung: Zwei Berichte, Berlin:
Berlin Verlag, 2006, p. 11. Transl. note: The German book
contains two texts, ‘Genaue Ortsbestimmung’ and ‘Der eigene
Tod’, originally published separately in Hungarian: ‘A helyzsin
ó vatos meghá rozá sa’ (A careful de inition of a place), in
Hátországi napló: Újabb usszék (Diary from the hinterland:
recent essays), Pé cs: Jelenkor, 2006, and Saját halál (One’s own
death), Pé cs: Jelenkor, 2004.
2. Ná das, Behutsame Ortsbestimmung, p. 25 and p. 17.
3. Ibid., p. 33.
4. Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 93–130;
here: p. 105.
5. Ibid., p. 106.
6. Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), Philosophical Writings, New
York: State University of New York, 1997, p. 54.
7. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 97.
8. See Andreas Reckwitz, The Society of Singularities, Cambridge:
Polity, 2020.
Storyselling
Storytelling is in vogue. Such is its popularity that it might seem as
though we have a renewed passion for telling each other stories. In fact,
however, this storytelling is anything but the return of narration.
Instead, it serves to instrumentalize and commercialize narration.
Storytelling is becoming established as an ef icient communication
technology, one that is often manipulative and has an ulterior motive.
The question is always the same: ‘How do we best use storytelling?’ We
would be mistaken to assume that all the product managers’ chatter
about storytelling indicates they are a new avant-garde promoting a
genuine narrative.
Storytelling as storyselling does not have the force that characterizes
genuine narration. Narratives introduce joints into being, so to speak.
These give it orientation and support. As products of storytelling, by
contrast, narratives share many features with information: they are
ephemeral, contingent and consumable. They cannot stabilize life.
Narratives are more effective than bare facts or igures because they
trigger emotions. Emotions are, in the main, responses to narratives.
‘Stories sell’ means, in effect, ‘emotions sell’. Emotions are located in
the limbic system, the part of our brain that controls our actions at the
physical-instinctual level of which we are not conscious. Emotions can
bypass our intellect and in luence our behaviour. Our conscious
defensive responses are thus circumvented. By intentionally
appropriating narratives, capitalism takes hold of life at a pre-re lexive
level and thus escapes conscious control and critical re lection.
Storytelling is spreading to different areas. Even data analysts are
learning how to tell stories, on the grounds that data by themselves are
soulless. Data are opposed to narrative. They do not touch people. They
appeal to the understanding rather than the emotions. Budding
journalists attend storytelling seminars, as if their task was to write
novels. Most crucially, however, storytelling is used in marketing, where
it is employed to transform even useless things into valuable goods.
Critical for ‘value added’ is a narrative that promises customers
something special. In the age of storytelling, we consume more
narratives than things. Narrative content is more important than use
value. Storytelling also commercializes the speci ic history of various
places, whose history is commercially exploited to increase the value
of the products that are produced there. A story [Geschichte] in the
proper sense, by contrast, creates a community by giving it an identity.
Storytelling turns every story [Geschichte] into a commodity.1
Even politicians have cottoned on to the fact that stories sell. In the
battle for attention, narratives are more effective than arguments.
They are therefore instrumentalized in politics. Politicians address the
emotions, not the intellect. When used as a political communication
technique, storytelling does not convey a political vision that reaches
into the future and provides meaning and orientation. Genuine political
narratives open up a perspective on a new order of things; they paint
pictures of possible worlds. Today, we singularly lack such hopeful
narratives of the future. We lurch from one crisis to the next. Politics is
reduced to problem solving. Only narratives open up a future.
Living is narrating. The human being is an animal narrans, and differs
from animals to the extent that, through narrative, new forms of life are
brought about. A narrative contains the power of a new beginning.
Every action that changes the world presupposes a narrative. But
storytelling knows only one form of life, and that is life as consumption.
Storytelling as storyselling is incapable of designing substantially
different forms of life. In the world of storytelling, everything is
reduced to consumption. This blinds us to other stories, other forms of
life, to other perceptions and realities. Therein lies the crisis of
narration in the age of storytelling.
Notes
1. Transl. note: In the German, ‘Geschichte’ can mean both ‘story’
and ‘history’.
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